Ed Solomon received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in Physical Chemistry, then postdoc-ed at The Orsted Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark doing Physical-Inorganic Chemistry and then at Caltech in Bioinorganic Chemistry. He joined MIT as an Assistant Professor in 1975, became a Full Professor in 1981, and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1982. He is the Monroe E. Spaght Professor in Chemistry and Professor of Photon Science at SLAC. He has received numerous awards and has been an Invited Professor in France, Argentina, Japan, China, India and Australia. His research focus is on using spectroscopy and quantum theory to understand the electronic structure of transition metal sites and how this leads to their physical properties and reactivity as active sites in catalysis. The latter include metal sites in biology that is the focus of the field of Bioinorganic Chemistry.
